black and nerdy: origin stories – when did you first start to identify as a black nerd?

Origin stories. Every superhero has one. Peter Parker and his fateful run-in with a radioactive spider. Superman and his dramatic arrival on planet Earth. Batman and the horrible, no good, very bad night at the theater. I’m definitely not even close to being a superhero, but when it comes to POC identities, I think there’s a lot of value in recounting and sharing our origin stories – not just for ourselves, but for others as well.

By Sharon Lynn Pruitt, AFROPUNK Contributor

Even though I grew up obsessed with things that could easily be described as nerdy (science fiction and fantasy, mostly), I didn’t always apply the label to myself. This reluctance didn’t come from a preoccupation with being cool (if you’d met me in junior high, you’d know the possibility of my being popular was about as likely as becoming  Krav Maga expert and fighting crime as a badass vigilante). Rather, my hesitancy to claim an identity as a nerd loudly and proudly stemmed from a sense of unbelonging that I just couldn’t shake. Nerds, in my mind, were associated with the tight-lipped white men who made me feel alien as they stood, stoic, behind the counters of comic book stores. They were the white kids at my school who scoffed at me if I tried to make conversation when noticing someone reading a walkthrough/guide of a video game I happened to love. In short, they were people who, despite our shared interests, made it clear that black girls didn’t really belong.

Discovering the work of (honestly, legendary science fiction writer) Octavia Butler was nothing short of life-changing for me. Before that, I’d had favorite writers whose work I could appreciate and admire, but a single thought always lingered in the back of my mind: ‘Sure, I like them, but would they like me?’ I’d had enough unpleasant experiences with white nerds that I didn’t have much hope that the famous ones would be much different.

Pictured: Octavia Butler in 1975, photo via openroadmedia.com

Knowing that there were black women writers out there, writing the kinds of stories I loved and wanted to write myself one day, filled me with a new kind of confidence. I knew logically what was possible for both black writers and characters, but seeing that there were already women out there blazing paths in these genres was exactly the kind of comfort I needed.

Around that same time, I started getting more involved in online communities, and connecting with other black fans. Through all of this, I learned that you didn’t have to be a passive consumer of media. I could struggle and grapple with complex, unspoken themes, whether or not anyone else even noticed these things in the first place. I didn’t have to set my blackness aside to be a nerd, and using AAVE didn’t make me any less of a fan. I didn’t have to try and fit molds made by white men on how to interact with media and pop culture (encyclopedic knowledge=good, fanfiction=bad).

I will admit that, when I was younger, I fought (hard) against putting black in front of any other descriptor I applied to myself. I was loathe to call myself a black nerd, or a black anything else, for that matter. I was resentful of having to make the distinction, and felt like, by doing so, I was somehow agreeing that nerds were inherently white; I was merely an outlier.

My views on that front have changed dramatically in the last ten or so years since I was in high school. The way I see it, putting ‘black’ in front of the word ‘nerd’ isn’t something that I do for the people who would automatically assume whiteness unless otherwise stated. It’s for people like me; a communal bat signal, if you will, or not-so-secret handshake. I’m a black nerd, and I make the distinction because it is my hope that, in doing so, it’ll eventually become common knowledge that the two (blackness and nerdiness) are not mutually exclusive. That a nerd can look like me and their interest in whatever it is that’s earned their obsessive love isn’t any less valid because of it. That may seem obvious to many of us, but there are plenty of people out there who will look surprised to hear that black people have hobbies just like any other average Joe or Jane, and while I’m not too worried about their opinion, what I do care about are the young black girls and boys who may be impressionable enough to internalize the opinions of others and, in turn, struggle with who and what they feel that they’re allowed to be as a black person.

If I were to have an origin story, a dramatic flashback retelling what made me the woman I am today, it wouldn’t involve any crash landings or radioactive spider bites. It’d just be a lonely, awkward little black girl who, very undramatically, logs onto the internet one day and happens to stumble upon blogs and book recs and communities that really, honestly, change everything.

What would yours be?

* Sharon Lynn Pruitt is a writer born and bred in St. Louis, MO. She can be found writing about things like intersectional identity and Battlestar Galactica on her blog, The Black Feminist Geek (theblackfeministgeek.wordpress.com), or on Twitter at @SLPruitt trying to make her long-winded rants fit into 140 characters.